Friday, February 10, 2017

Audio Deja Vu: Audio Formatted Math On The Emacspeak Desktop

1 Overview

This article previews a new feature in the next Emacspeak release —
audio-formatted Mathematics using Aural CSS. Volker Sorge worked
at Google as a Visiting Scientist from Sep 2012 to August 2013, when
we implemented math
access in ChromeVox — see this brief overview. Since leaving
Google, Volker has refactored and extended his work to create an Open
Source Speech-Rule-Engine implemented using NodeJS. This
speech-rule-engine can be used in many different environments;
Emacspeak leverages that work to enable audio-formatting and
interactive browsing of math content.

2 Overview Of Functionality

Once loaded, module emacspeak-maths provides a Math Navigator that
implements the user interface for sending Math expressions to the
Speech-Rule-Engine, and for interactively browsing the resulting
structure. At each step of the interaction, Emacspeak receives math
expressions that have been annotated with Aural CSS and produces
audio-formatted output. The audio-formatted text can itself be
navigated in a special Spoken Math emacs buffer.

Module emacspeak-maths.el implements various affordances for
dispatching mathematical content to the Speech-Rule-Engine — see
usage examples in the next section.

3 Usage Examples

3.1 The Emacspeak Maths Navigator

The maths navigator can be invoked by pressing S-SPC (hold
down Windows key and press SPC) — this runs the command emacspeak-maths-navigator/body.

Once invoked, the /Maths Navigator can be used to enter an
expression to read.

Pressing SPC again prompts for the LaTeX math expression.

Pressing RET guesses the expression to read from the current context.

The arrow keys navigate the expression being read.

Pressing o switches to the Spoken Math buffer and exits the
navigator.